For purposes including marketing analysis and business development, it is important for business entities to maintain an accurate gauge of how much a particular brand, trademark, or other form of key terms that relate to their business interests are being discussed or referenced online in various online venues and databases, such as web-based social network sites. There are many types of currently available social sites that are publically-accessible or commercial subscription-based. Some examples are social network venues and media sharing sites such as Facebook®, MySpace®, YouTube®, Flickr®, the microblogging site Twitter®, and online blogs, all of which are accessible over the internet, or “web-based.” Some common characteristics among these online resources include an ever-evolving and viral nature and a rapidly-responsive spread of exposure and impact for certain key terms that are being searched for, discussed, viewed, and described within the sites by a plurality of individual users. Hereinafter, these online resources will also be generally referred to as “web-based social network sites.”
These sites also have many significant characteristics that are widely disparate, such as the amount of their searchable stores of data. In searching blogs, for instance, one may find over 600 billion searchable entries. On the other hand, within the popular and growing micro-blogging service Twitter®, one may only find a few million searchable entries. These sites have great variation in audience size and the differing impact of various media types to their users; impact can vary rapidly over time, as sources increase or decrease in popularity, size, and types of media that can be accessed. Also, a piece of media such as a video may consist of only one search result but run many minutes in duration. Similarly, photos may have an impact that is not adequately captured by a few text tags.
For these and other reasons, aggregation and interpretation of data associated with key terms within web-based social network sites is made very difficult. There are many needs caused by these shortcomings. One such need is for a system and/or methods for retrieving data from the disparate online sources, weighting the impact of these sources relative to each other and relative to their total amount of data, and providing an accurate snap shot of the activity surrounding the key terms.